Tucker Carlson accused trans folks of playing God. It’s Christians who’ve done this for centuries

In an unhinged doomsday tirade on his Fox “News” program on the evening of March 28, Tucker Carlson literally spit out the words that transgender people are Christians’ “natural enemies.”

His outburst stemmed from his discussion of the recent mass shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee Presbyterian elementary school by a lone perpetrator police identified as transgender who had previously attended the school. The shooting resulted in the death of three nine-year-old students and three adult employees, including the head administrator.

Related:

Tucker Carlson says trans people are Christians’ “natural enemies” in doomsday rant

“He’s trying to get people killed.”

But of the 130 mass shootings that, according to the Gun Violence Archive, have already taken place in the U.S. this year, virtually all were committed by cisgender people.

Carlson painted “good Christians” with a broad brush as very modest and humble people while categorizing transgender people as arrogant and audacious.

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“In Christianity, the price of admission is admitting that you’re not God,” Carlson said. “Christians openly can see they have no real power over anything and, for that matter, very little personal virtue. They will tell you to your face if they are sinful and helpless and basically absurd. They are not embarrassed about any of this, they brag about it.”

Comparing trans people, Carlson twisted himself into a pretzel by claiming, “The trans movement takes the opposite view. Trans ideology claims dominion over nature itself. ‘We can change the identity we are born with,’ they will tell you with wild-eyed certainty.”

Christians, he continued, are very different from trans people because Christians believe that “these are powers…God alone possesses. That unwillingness to agree, that failure to acknowledge a trans person’s dominion over nature incites and enrages some in the trans community.”

Carlson then accused transgender people of thinking that “they’re God.”

“People who believe they’re God can’t stand to be reminded that they are not,” he said. “So, Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled. They are on a collision course with each other. One side is likely to draw blood before the other side.”

Tucker Carlson is a very dangerous person. Not only does he host the most watched cable evening propaganda-posing-as-news program, but his influence extends to being the virtual leader, next to Donald Trump, of the Republican Party.

So, why is the Republican Party targeting trans people? Simple: to divert attention away from the fact that the Party is morally, ethically, and politically bankrupt and lacks any reason for existing.

Carlson does a great disservice to Christians by assuming they are a monolith of thought, behavior, and belief. While the Vatican certainly slanders transgender people, not all denominations follow suit. Some American Baptist, Episcopal, and Methodist churches, for example, are accepting of the trans community.

The Vatican hierarchy, however, fenced off Alex Salinas, a 21-year-old trans man from Cadiz, Spain, by informing him that it had denied his request to become the godparent of his nephew because being transgender is incongruent with Catholic teaching. 

According to the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, its doctrine-enforcing agency, transgender status “reveals in a public way an attitude opposite to the moral imperative of solving the problem of sexual identity according to the truth of one’s own sexuality. Therefore, it is evident that this person does not possess the requirement of leading a life according to the faith and in the position of godfather and is therefore unable to be admitted to the position of godfather or godmother.”

Far prior to this statement, Joan of Arc, the teenager who helped defeat the English in her native France, became one of the greatest war heroes in French history. Despite this, the Roman Catholic Church tried and convicted Joan on the charge of heresy in rejecting Church authority in preference for direct inspiration from God by – in large part – donning men’s clothing. Joan died by burning at the stake at the hands of the Church.

Pope Francis, the so-called “progressive” Pope, further trashed trans people in a speech to the Pontifical Academy for Life’s general assembly in which he labeled gender confirmation surgery as “manipulation” and a “choice.”   

“The biological and physical manipulation of sexual difference, which biomedical technology allows us to perceive as completely available to free choice — which it is not! — thus risks dismantling the source of energy that nurtures the alliance between man and woman and which renders it creative and fruitful.”

In his on-air tirade, Tucker Carlson also distorted history and revised the facts.

In fact, history shows that it was Christian nationalists who believed they were God, or at least, that God spoke to them and, therefore, gave them justification to commit some of the vilest atrocities ever to fall upon the Earth: colonization.

Though the official terms “colonization,” “colonizer,” and “colonized” may have changed somewhat, nowhere in the world have we experienced a truly post-colonial society. Though at times less visible, imperialism remains.

On March 30, 2023, the Vatican finally repudiated its so-called “Doctrine of Discovery,” but this will never atone for the land theft, cultural decimation, forced Christian conversion, and genocide committed as justification for white expansionism extending around the globe, including, of course, in what today is referred to as the “United States of America.” All of this was done in the name of a Christian god. And now in some states, patriarchal Christian white nationalists are passing laws barring students from discussing this history in the schools.

A series of papal bulls (decrees or edicts) beginning in the 1100s launched sanctions, enforcements, authorizations, expulsions, excommunications, denunciations, and, in particular, expressions of territorial sovereignty for Christian monarchs supported by the Catholic Church.

These bulls established what would come to be known as the “Doctrine of Discovery”: a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of territories not already inhabited by Christians.

Two of these papal bulls particularly stand out:

Pope Nicholas V issued his “Romanus Pontifex” in 1455 granting Portugal a monopoly trading status with Africa and authorizing the enslavement of indigenous populations.

In 1455, Pope Nicholas V called his Christian followers to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans,” take their possessions, and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

Pope Alexander VI issued “Inter Caetera” in 1493 to justify Christian European explorers’ claims on land and waterways they “discovered” and to promote Christian domination in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Americans.

The United States justified its “Monroe Doctrine” in the 1880s by declaring U.S. dominion over the Western Hemisphere and its claim of “Manifest Destiny” of expansionism westward as its destiny to control all land from the Atlantic to the Pacific and beyond.

In the 1823 Supreme Court case, Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Doctrine of Discovery became part of U.S. federal law used to dispossess Native peoples of their lands.

In a unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, “the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands” and Native peoples certain rights of occupancy.

This Doctrine of Discovery gave license to commit genocide against people of color and non-Christians across the world. It was the stimulus for Columbus’ travels and is based on patriarchal Christian white supremacy.

The good people of the United States will stand firm and not allow the latest incarnation of patriarchal Christian white nationalism to colonize the transgender community or any other community.

For Tucker Carlson and all the other vile conspiracy theorists, your reign of fear and terror will soon be over.